C. Subramania Bharati (1882-1921) has an unrivalled reputation in twentieth-century Tamil literature and has come to be known as the Tamil ‘Mahakavi’, meaning ‘Supreme Poet’. His work as a poet and prose-writer ignited a Renaissance in modern Tamil writing. However, he also wrote and published regularly in English.
The Coming Age brings together Bharati’s important English writings in an authoritative and reliable edition presented by his great-granddaughter. The pieces in this volume reveal a well informed and cosmopolitan writer, engaging with the world around him, passionately sharing his opinions.
Exploring Indian history and culture, offering a shattering contemporary view of the colonial experience, commenting on political events, advocating for women’s rights and caste equality, and sharing his deep knowledge of the Tamil language and literary tradition, these pieces present Bharati in a new light for a new generation.
Catagory: Fiction
Fiction main category
Impetuous Women
Impetuous Women is about women who step across the Lakshman Rekha, whose transgressions fly in the face of the establishment, the patriarchy, often their own families and loved ones. From two housewives who play a potentially lethal game of keeping up to an expert baker who serves revenge with chocolate sprinkles on top; from a stern hostel warden who examines her relationship with the teenagers she must surveil to a grouchy widow shuts out the world; from a couple madly in love and desperate for a bit of privacy to a tender bond between a husband and wife, these stories create an unforgettable portrait of modern-day India and the experiential realities of being impetuous, of being women.
This darkly comic, thrillingly tragic collection of stories is sensuous, bittersweet and whimsical by turns, and always wildly, subversively original.
Hunchprose
What affirms our humanity, enduring beyond our barbarism? Where is home, in a world beleaguered by climate crisis, pandemic and genocide? Hunchprose is Ranjit Hoskote’s fierce, poignant testament to these urgencies.
The title of this dazzling new collection asserts poetry’s claim to be heard above the buzz of data, to transform language, broken by history, into music. Vibrant with linguistic experiment, Hunchprose weaves unpredictable patterns, celebrates our plural selves. In the erasure of ancient scripts, the melting Arctic ice, a lion tamer’s primal fear, we recognize vulnerability and rupture. A dancer’s courage, a leather worker’s revolutionary promise, a locksmith’s passion for ruins inspire us to redeem ourselves through love, doubt, hope and dream.
Infused with wry humour, informed by the wisdom traditions, Hunchprose urges us to look at our world, and within ourselves, with renewed ardour.
Grains of Stardust
Offering a unique expression of thought reflecting feeling more than meaning, Grains of Stardust is a synesthetic stream of consciousness that does not distinguish between journey and destination, but meanders unchecked upon the river of human emotion.
‘Read my poetry out loud
Breathe it in
and taste the letters pour out.
A delicious sound.
Do you hear the colours take form?
Feel the pages move you
as you float in space
make some space
Open your mind
and get inside
and see all that
shimmering
marmalade liquid.
Grains of stardust‘
You Only Live Once
What if you ran away from your life today?
Twenty years later, three people are looking for you.
One is dying to meet you again.
The other wishes you had never met them.
The third wishes they could have met you at least once.
You are one person. Aren’t you? But you are not the same person to each of them.
Find the answers about your own life in this story about searching for love and discovering yourself. Join a broken but rising YouTube star Alara, a struggling but hopeful stand-up comedian Aarav, and a zany but zen beach shack owner Ricky. Together, take the journey to seek the truth behind the famous singer Elisha’s disappearance somewhere by the deep sea in Goa.
Will you be able to find Elisha? Or will you end up finding yourself?
Jugalbandi : Bhajpa Modi Yug Se Pahale
Narendra Modi has been a hundred years in the making. Vinay Sitapati’s
Jugalbandi provides this backstory to his current dominance in Indian politics. It
begins with the creation of Hindu nationalism as a response to British-induced
elections in the 1920s, moves on to the formation of the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) in 1980, and ends with its first national government, from 1998 to 2004.
And it follows this journey through the entangled lives of its founding jugalbandi:
Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani.
Over their six-decade-long relationship, Vajpayee and Advani worked as a team
despite differences in personality and beliefs. What kept them together was
fraternal love and professional synergy, of course, but also, above all, an
ideology that stressed on unity. Their partnership explains what the BJP before
Modi was, and why it won.
In supporting roles are a cast of characters-from the warden’s wife who made
room for Vajpayee in her family to the billionaire grandson of Pakistan’s founder
who happened to be a major early funder of the BJP. Based on private papers,
party documents, newspapers and over two hundred interviews, this is a mustread
for those interested in the ideology that now rules India.
Abhi Baki Hai Safar …
A thoughtful and revealing memoir from one of the world’s most
recognizable women, renowned for her bold risk-taking,
multiculturalism, and activism.
“I am a product of traditional India and its ancient wisdom, and modern India and
its urban bustle. My upbringing was always an amalgamation of the two Indias,
and, just as much, of East and West.” Unfinished takes readers from Priyanka’s
childhood in India, where she was raised by her grandparents and her parentstwo
army doctors committed not only to their children but to their careers and to
philanthropy-before being sent away to boarding school at an early age; through
her formative teenage years in the U.S. living with extended family in the
Midwest (Cedar Rapids and Indianapolis), Queens, and suburban Boston, where
she endured bouts of racism; to her return to India, where she unexpectedly won
the national and global beauty pageants (Miss India and Miss World) that
launched her acting career. Readers looking for a glimpse into what it takes to
succeed in the massive Indian film industry will find it here, and they’ll also find
an honest account of the challenges Priyanka faced navigating her career, both
in India and Hollywood. The result is a book that is warm, funny, sassy,
inspiring, bold, and rebellious. Just like Priyanka herself.
From her dual-continent twenty-year-long career as an actor and producer to her
work as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, from losing her beloved father to
cancer to marrying Nick Jonas, Priyanka Chopra Jonas’s story will inspire a
generation around the world to gather their courage, embrace their ambition, and
commit to the hard work of following their dreams.
Aath Din
Vikas Gupta’s business was swindle (thagi) whom he always performed with all success so beautifully. What is his connection with murder? But that connection somehow emerged and silently gripped him when he became a witness of a murder.
Khaali Makan
By giving the title of Glamor Boy to Sunil, citing bias in his unlikely success, Inspector Prabhudayal demanded an independent investigation of the case. As a result, he had an intriguing, spider-webs-like complex story of double-murder which was the challenge of his creator for him.
Biwi Ka Hatyara
Police Inspector Ravi Sharma took a lesson from his training, not to trust; and his lesson overshadowed by him. And in the process to fathom a serious crime like murder, he entangled in a trap and reached the plank of the hanging!
To know why and how, do read, Biwi ka Hatyara.